Queditor Vincent Tanforan Dies in Kafkaesque Torture Spectacle

The Quest is deeply grieved to report that editor Vincent Tanforan ‘27 died on Wednesday, December 10, in an accident related to his reconstruction of the apparatus from Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” Intending to test the machine’s functionality, Tanforan instead found himself strapped into the torture machine from 5pm to midnight that Wednesday night, conveniently recreating the experience of Quest editing night in a literal version of the spiritual pain felt when reading another sentence with eight commas and three em-dashes.

Forensic analysis has uncovered that Tanforan had nearly the entirety of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land tattooed on his body via apparatus before death. It appears that Tanforan died right after “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison,” which anyone who caught him on a particularly wild Friday night can confirm were some of his favorite lines, making for a fitting end. One can only hope Tanforan reached the moment of spiritual clarity that Kafka described prisoners reaching moments before death. An anonymous eyewitness reported that, immediately before dying, Tanforan uttered the immortal words, “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt.” While we cannot actually know what either the late Queditor or Joan of Arc felt, the tortuous conditions of Tanforan’s death suggest that he may have a better claim than Morrissey to understand the famous martyr.

The story behind Tanforan’s Kafkaesque demise sparks criticism of the harsh academic rigor encouraged by Reed’s curriculum. Before his death, Tanforan was disturbingly fixated on creating an elaborate senior thesis to redeem the History-Literature major from its reputation of intellectual bankruptcy. After floating the possibility of a History-Literature-Theatre triple interdisciplinary major, Tanforan objected to the theatre department’s restrictions on his planned French-language Starlight Express thesis show, which would have required the performance to be 30 minutes long, with no singing and no roller skating. In response, Tanforan changed course and began getting a head start on his new thesis project, an exact replica of the apparatus from Franz Kafka’s famous instructional self-help guide. He hoped this construction would replace the physics bells thesis project that used to be in the Bio-Physics underpass as a representation of Reed’s interdisciplinary academics. In a controversial move to escape reputational damage, the History-Literature chairs have burned the apparatus and all of Tanforan’s notes.

Anonymous sources say Iris Jan ‘27 was responsible for pulling the lever that led to Tanforan’s untimely demise, but she denies her culpability. After taking HUM 220 with Tanforan, Jan attests to the late Queditor’s overzealous fixation on Kafka’s story when it came up in the curriculum. As for her guilt, Jan said, “Admittedly, I didn’t do it, and even if I did, I lacked the requisite mens rea to be responsible. You can’t expect someone who’s taking comp systems lab to be thinking properly about their actions… now there’s a real story for the Quest…” 

Tanforan is survived by his Catholic Renn Fayre wife, Petra Smith ‘27. Smith vows to never marry again and denies allegations that she is the same person as Jan, which has earned her harassment and blame for her late husband’s death. In addition to his Catholic wife, Tanforan is survived by his Mormon husband, Theo Muehr ‘27. As a theatre major, Muehr expressed his awe for Tanforan’s method of death, stating, “From a performance studies lens, it represents a quintessential juxtaposition of artistic subjectivity with the imposition of structural authority … Very Theatre of Cruelty.” Muehr also expressed his discontent that he “[has] no one to ragebait now.”

The loss of the Queditor who once described himself as “the Hunter S. Thompson of Reed College” will send shockwaves to the journalistic community at large, especially the right-wing nut-men and Atlantic reporters of dubious credibility who love to spam the Quest inbox. Moreover, the student body will never get to read his unfinished oeuvre. While articles like “69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields Ranked in Ascending Order” will be now be lost to time, reconstruction efforts from Tanforan’s 2025 Amazon Music Wrapped suggest that the top five would have been “Long Forgotten Fairytale,” “I Can’t Touch You Anymore,” “Epitaph For My Heart,” “I Think I Need a New Heart,” and “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” in that order. 

Tanforan’s passing has also dealt a major blow to the quarter-Asian population on campus. “I don’t think we’ll ever get the Wasian Studies minor approved at this rate,” said fellow Quasian Ella Tashjian ‘27. “I don’t even know if we can make up a full Asian anymore,” she lamented. All quarter-Asians are encouraged to reach out to Tashjian to build community in the wake of this loss. 

In spite of the grief felt by many across campus, the Reed College Office of Admission expressed its hopes that the Quest will print more prospie-friendly front page content without the late Tanforan’s foul-mouthed and gutter-minded presence at the helm. (The surviving Queditors can attest that signs point to no, but maybe we can finally stop calling things “placenta” now.)

In Tanforan’s memory, we leave these lines from the poem that spelt out his demise for you to chew on: 

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land).